Time is an important aspect of so many kinds of information. It is useful to be able to display time-based information on a timeline to visually present the time aspect of the information. Current web technology and computer visualization methods deal with time-based data with various domain specific or ad hoc methods. For example, there are calendar programs that can be used to organize appointments and tasks in the calendar according to the dates assigned to those events. And there are programs that are capable of displaying data (e.g. economic or financial data) along timelines to highlight trends and changes in the data. There is, however, a need for a unified and visually effective way of representing temporal relationships for multiple different contexts and to fit time related data from multiple different sources into a consistent viewing framework.